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Viome

January 31, 2022

I Tried Viome’s Health Intelligence Test to Understand My Gut Microbiome and Biological Age

In recent years, the gut microbiome has drawn a lot of attention in the field of nutrition science for being able to tell us an extraordinary amount about our health. Viome, a personalized nutrition company founded by executive and entrepreneur Naveen Jain, offers at-home testing that allows users to get insight into their microbiome and overall health. As someone who is deeply interested in cutting-edge personalized nutrition, I was excited to try out one of Viome’s at-home testing kits.

Taking the test

Viome sent me its Health Intelligence Test, which measures stress response, biological age, and the health of your immune system, gut microbiome, cells, and mitochondria. Taking Viome’s at-home test is straightforward, and simply required both a blood and stool sample. The testing kit included all the materials needed to gather this, and supplied extra testing materials just in case you made a mistake during the collection process. I appreciated that the instructions were detailed but also easy to follow.

Once the stool and blood samples are gathered, packaged, and sealed, I just had to drop them off in a prepaid package at my local post office. Once the samples are received, Viome states that it takes about four weeks to receive the results, which is about the amount of time it took for mine.

Before you receive the results, you must take a lengthy intake survey in Viome’s user portal that asks questions about what you eat, how you sleep, stress levels, and other lifestyle questions. It took me about 40 minutes to answer all of the questions.

Background on my health

Prior to disclosing my results and experience with using Viome’s test, I think it is important to share my perceived health and lifestyle to give you more background. For the past eight years, I have followed a whole-foods, plant-based/vegan diet that incorporates a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains. I do yoga and walk every day, and rock climb multiple times a week. I get plenty of outside time because I hike, stand-up paddleboard, and forage for wild foods. I do not smoke, am not a heavy drinker, and have no chronic illnesses. I have rarely taken antibiotics in my life.

The results

In general, I consider myself to be a very healthy person and feel great most of the time. Therefore, I was surprised when I received my results.

Overall, my results were not terrible, but they were not great, and certainly did not meet my expectations. The results were graded on a scale from 0 to 100 (0 being the worst, 100 being the best), and the classification of being not optimal, average, or good.

How my mitochondrial health, immune system health, and stress response health were rated in my Viome portal

My cellular and mitochondrial health were classified as “not optimal”. My gut microbiome health and immune system health was rated as “average”, while my stress response health was “good”. I am 25 years old, but my biological health was considered to be that of a 21-year-old.

Within these larger categories were subcategories that were also graded. For example, within the “gut lining” category, there were other subcategories like butyrate production pathways and gut lining health.

The number of different ingredients recommended to me

One of the things that surprised me the most was that based on my results, the company recommended 56 different ingredients for me to supplement with. This included vitamins, herbs, minerals, food extracts, amino acids, prebiotics, and probiotics “we’ve identified to improve or help maintain your scores.”

Within the Viome portal, you can see what bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, viruses, and probiotics, are present in the “My Active Microbes” section. My test results show that my sample contained several viruses: Paprika mild mottle virus, Pepper mild mottle virus, Tobacco mild green mosaic virus, Tomato brown rugose fruit virus. These are plant diseases, so I did not understand why this showed up in my gut.

As I mentioned before, I eat a diverse whole-food diet, eat pro-and prebiotic foods, forage wild foods, and even brew my own fermented beverages. Despite my efforts to maintain a healthy gut, only one probiotic strain was identified in my sample and my active microbial diversity ranked low.

A few of the foods on the “minimize” list

The company recommends foods that you should avoid and minimize, and also foods that are considered “superfoods” for your body. My avoid list had five foods listed (tomato, paprika, alfalfa sprouts, bell pepper, and mung bean sprouts), while my minimize list consisted of nearly 80 different foods. My superfood list consisted of 17 different foods, including cabbage, apple, artichoke, and broccoli.

Understanding the results

I first felt overwhelmed and stressed about receiving my test results, and decided to share them with my primary care physician. After looking over my results she said she was not concerned at all, especially since I did not have any symptoms I was worried about. I asked her specific questions about why some of my scores were not optimal, and she said that was not her field of specialty, and in all honestly, she wasn’t even sure of who would be best to bring my test results to.

I then decided it would be best to speak with someone from Viome to discuss my results further. I was able to talk with Grant Antoine, a naturopath by training and clinical expert at Viome. The Viome test results are intended to be self-explanatory, and Antoine said, “They’re straightforward, and hopefully, you’re doing a lot of the interpretation on your own.” When I asked who would be best to take the results to for a deeper explanation, he stated that a nutritionist or health coach would be a good option.

I actually have completed my health coaching certification and felt that I still needed to take the results to someone who was more qualified than myself.

Personally, I felt as if supplementing with 56 ingredients is excessive, especially since as a young, plant-based, athletic female, I already take a decent amount of supplements. When I asked Antoine to elaborate on why this is necessary, he said that this recommendation is based on my results, questionnaire, goals, and scores, and then seeing where there might be an opportunity to improve my scores. The recommendations are based on the company’s artificial intelligence engine that calculates the best way to support your scores and gaps with food and supplement.

Purchasing 56 different supplements would be extremely pricey (and take up a lot of cupboard space), but Viome offers personalized supplements it creates for you based on your results. If I did want to follow these supplement recommendations, it would really only make sense to purchase from the company. Viome offers customized supplements for a monthly subscription fee of $150 per month, which includes all of the recommended ingredients.

When asked why I had plant viruses present in my gut, Antoine said that when we eat plants that contain these viruses, they can linger in our gut, potentially causing an immune response or affecting the gut lining. He also said, “What exactly they’re doing, how harmful they are, we don’t exactly know if I am being 100% upfront, but there are indications that they’re inflammatory.”

Conclusion

When I asked Antoine if anyone had perfect scores across all health categories, he said, “For most people, there’s, room for improvement. We do have some all-stars that come through and they’re green across the board. I would say that those are elite athletes; there are some superstars out there.”

After already spending years figuring out what foods I should avoid, and creating health and wellness routines that make me feel great, I have decided to not follow Viome’s recommendations. Even though my results were slightly alarming, Antoine said, “But you actually have a very good result. You have a really good report of your biological age. I consider that to be kind of like your overall report card grades.” Maybe if I did follow the recommendations and take the supplements, I would feel better than I could have ever imagined.

If you are interested in giving Viome’s Health Intelligence Test a try yourself, it is currently available on sale for $199 (It is normally $299). For $129 (normally $199), the Gut Intelligence Test can be purchased on its own.

September 8, 2021

Viome Launches At-Home Test Kits in Nordstrom

Personalized nutrition and health company Viome Life Sciences announced today that it will now offer its Health Intelligence Test in the department store chain Nordstrom. The wellness product will be a part of the store’s beauty category.

The test measures microbial, human, and mitochondrial gene expression through samples of blood and stool. As a result, insights are offered on the individual’s cellular health, biological age, immune system health, and gut health. The company claims that these insights can help someone better understand their digestion, energy levels, sleep patterns, skin, weight, and hormones.

While a precision health company selling an mRNA test in a fashion retailer seems unlikely, this news might signal that personalized nutrition is moving into the mainstream. Personalized nutrition is expected to change the way we eat, and the global personalized nutrition market is forecasted to grow from being $3.7 billion in 2019 to $16.6 billion by 2027.

When Viome founder and CEO Naveen Jain spoke with The Spoon earlier this year, he talked about how he’d invested heavily in automated production to scale the company’s personalized nutrition testing. With the deal with retailers like Nordstrom’s, it looks like that investment may be paying off.

“Precision nutrition is the future,” said Jain in the announcement. “This partnership is a giant step towards making our technology more accessible, so people can understand what’s right for their unique body.”

Viome isn’t the only company in personalized nutrition to offer an at-home testing kit. Genopalate uses information from DNA swabs to create personalized nutrition plans for the user. DayTwo focuses on the gut microbiome to provide customized diet recommendations, while Sun Genomics develops probiotics specifically for the user based on their gut health. According to Viome, it offers the world’s first at-home mRNA test that is commercially available.

Viome’s Health Intelligence Test is now available on Nordstrom’s website for $199 USD, and starting in 2022, will be stocked at select store locations.

March 17, 2021

To Make Truly Personalized Nutrition Products, Naveen Jain Realized He Needed to Build a Robotic Factory

Back when we wrote about Viome for our DNA-based personalized nutrition report last year, the company primary product was a personalized nutrition plan based on what they had learned from the DNA and RNA of a customer’s microbiome. Viome would then use this information provide nutritional guidance and meal plans for the customer.

While this is valuable and markedly different from traditional nutrition planning, it’s still the largely the same in one significant way: Viome’s nutrition plans still required the user to then go out and assemble a hodge-podge of supplements at the store or through Amazon that would help them take action on the information in the reports.

Naveen Jain, the CEO of Viome, realized that was a problem.

“We will tell you that here are the nutrients that your body needs, and what we found was that there was no way to give people the precision nutrition,” said Jain in a recent interview on Clubhouse. “The problem was they contain 10 other things that went with that. And other nine things were actually harmful to you and only one was beneficial.”

“We couldn’t figure out how to actually tell you what you need, and nothing that you don’t.”

Jain decided that what his company needed to do was provide highly personalized vitamins tailored for each person individually. In order to do that, however, the company would need to solve a massive engineering question: How do you create personalized supplements tailored for a particular person’s biomarkers at scale?

The answer was to build a robotic factory.

“We decided what if we could create completely automated robotics, where every single capsule is made for each individual based on every ingredient that the person needs in the precise dosage.”

Jain emphasized how the precision created by automation was key to assemble tailored supplements with up to 75 different nutrients.

“We literally see ‘take from the bins 17 milligrams’ and ‘take from the bins 13 milligrams’ and we literally make those powder, encapsulate them and ship them on that date. This has never been done.”

Jain believes other companies that claim to offer personalized nutrition supplements today aren’t really personalized nutrition, but more just matching categories of supplements to consumers on a closest-fit basis. To build a truly personalized nutrition consumable product is a massive engineering challenge.

“No one has figured out how to do these things at scale,” said Jain. “And that was our biggest challenge to build this massive robotic form to do it at scale.”

I talked with Jain in The Spoon’s Clubhouse room, FoodTech Live, last week. If you’d like to listen in on these conversations live, make sure to follow us on Clubhouse. And of course, you can listen to this conversation and others on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

And, as always, you can just click play below.

June 4, 2020

Report: How Microbiome and DNA-based Personalized Nutrition Will Change the Way We Eat (Spoon Plus)

The “first wave” of personalized nutrition is already here. These are companies that use data from wearable devices to track consumers’ weight, exercise quantities, temperature and other factors that can shape food and beverage suggestions.

The next step, or “second wave,” on the evolutionary path of personalized nutrition will get even more granular in terms of the information about each individual that services can pull and analyze. Instead of drawing on data from wearables, third-party companies will use information gathered from inside individual bodies, either from gut microbes or DNA sequences. Using this data, companies will be able to create truly personalized diet plans driven by lab results and deep analysis, instead of the more generalized metrics that are available through wearables. These second-wave services can create meal journeys that are absolutely unique to each individual based not on of general trends or self-reported data but actual biology.

This report will examine the biomarker-driven, personalized nutrition landscape. It will examine key drivers, market players, opportunities and challenges, and make forward-looking predictions about what this market will look like over the next 12 months, 5 years and 10 years.

Companies profiled in this report include Viome, Sun Genomics, Genopalate, DNANudge, DayTwo and Nylos.

This research report is exclusive for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.

February 19, 2020

Viome’s CTO on why Gut Microbes plus AI can Reveal Perfect Diet

For all of us trying to eat healthier — especially those who are battling a chronic disease — figuring out exactly how certain foods will affect your body is critical. That’s what Viome is trying to help people determine. The startup examines your microbiome to create personalized dining recommendations (and recipes) featuring foods that are an ideal fit for your biology.

We’re pretty fascinated by the whole concept of microbiome-based eating, so invited Guru Banavar, the CTO of Viome, to speak at The Spoon’s Customize event in New York on February 27. If you want to join us (you should!) there are only a few tickets left, so get on it! (Use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off.)

To give you a taste of what’s to come, we asked Banavar a few questions about microbiome-driven eating, his time learning about AI with IBM Watson, and the biggest challenges for selling personal nutrition.

This interview has been edited for grammar and clarity,

Tell us a little bit about what Viome does.
Viome is on a mission to help people take control of their health and ultimately prevent and reverse chronic disease. We do this by understanding people’s biology on a molecular level, especially in their gut microbiome, using our proprietary metatranscriptomics technology combined with powerful AI-driven analysis to deliver them personalized insights and recommendations.

What’s the difference between personalized nutrition based on your microbiome (gut bacteria), and personalized nutrition based on your DNA?
Our microbial genome is between 2 to 20 million microbial genes, making our genetic material 99% microbial. This means that to fully understand the human body we must start by collecting data and analyzing the gut microbiome – the richest source of our microbes.  

Therefore, the first difference is that DNA tests only look at DNA (your genes), which never change throughout your life — even if you develop a chronic disease. We at Viome look at RNA (gene expression, or what your genes are actually doing within your body) which is dynamic and changes all the time. It’s a better indicator of overall wellness and chronic disease. Since any two humans share [more than] 99 percent the same DNA, but only about 5 percent of the same microbial DNA,  each person’s microbiome is incredibly unique — what works for you may not work for me.

In the past you’ve worked for a long time at IBM Watson. How do you think your AI experience has helped in the personalized nutrition field?
I was involved in solving a wide variety of problems from different industries at IBM Watson, so I quickly learned that AI is not one thing but really a toolbox of many techniques that you need to put together depending on the problem you’re solving.  Personalized nutrition based on molecular data is a very challenging field, and I brought my experience with the full range of AI tools & techniques to get the fastest and the most effective solution.

Viome currently recommends diets and recipes. Do you see it ever working in tandem with foodservice or grocery?
We already see many of our customers reporting that they use their Viome app in the grocery store, when they are choosing foods and supplements online or when they are selecting from restaurant menus. As we build new services within our app we are looking to make this frictionless, and we are in early stage discussions with a number of large grocery retailers and international food companies…. watch this space!

What do you think is the biggest challenge for personalized nutrition?
We have actually found that once people understand the technology, take the test, they see amazing results, so our job is less about acceptance and more about awareness and inspiration.

The science around personalized nutrition is advancing rapidly with multiple new papers published every day, especially connecting the microbiome and chronic diseases like Diabetes, Obesity, IBS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimers and Cancer. Our world class science team is working with partners like the Mayo Clinic, Kaiser, United Healthcare and GSK, among others, to not only keep on top of the science but advance it through clinical studies and trials. Not all companies who give personalized nutrition recommendations with the same depth of scientific rigor and understanding, so education is important.

Banavar will be speaking about microbiome-driven personalized nutrition along with the CEO of Sun Genomics at Customize! Don’t miss out — use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off your ticket now, before they’re gone.

October 18, 2019

SKS 2019: Naveen Jain Thinks We’re 5 Years Away from Making Sickness Optional

Back in 2010, entrepreneur Naveen Jain co-founded Moon Express, a privately held company gunning for the Moon. “When you have literally taken the moon shot, what do you do for an encore?” he asked the audience at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2019.

For Jain, the answer was, tackle healthcare. (No big, right?) To do so, he started personalized nutrition company Viome in 2016. Last week Jain told SKS attendees that he believes we’re just five years away from making sickness “optional.”

If you want to hear Jain’s vision for curing some of society’s most persistent diseases, you can watch the video of his conversation with moderator Brian Frank at SKS 2019 below. But for you impatient folks out there, the (very) short solution to curing chronic disease is to eat better.

Easier said than done, of course. You may think you know what “eating healthy” means — greens, lean proteins, etc. — but as Jain says, “What is healthy for one person is actually maybe toxic for someone else.”

Jain gives an inspiring argument for why we should all take a much closer look at what’s going on in our gut, and why personalized nutrition could help make disease a thing of the past. Check out the video below to hear why and keep an eye out for more content from SKS 2019 coming your way!

SKS 2019: The Power of Personalized Nutrition

October 1, 2019

Naveen Jain Says for Perfectly Personalized Food, Trust Your Gut. Literally

What if the food you ate could not only help you feel better and lose (or gain) weight, but also cure chronic health conditions, make you more alert, or even clear up your skin?

That’s exactly what personalized nutrition company Viome is trying to do. Viome’s CEO Naveen Jain will be onstage at the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} next week to talk about biomapping your menu and the power of personalized diets.

We spoke with Jain recently to learn more about how he’s trying to reinvent individual nutrition, starting with the gut. Read a little teaser about our conversation on Viome’s capabilities below, and be sure to get your tickets to SKS (there’s only a few left!) to hear him talk about the future of nutrition and personalization onstage.

You might not know it, but there are over 40 trillion microbes currently living in our gut. These microbes help us break down food and absorb nutrition, but, as living organisms, they differ person to person. So why isn’t the food we eat attuned to our specific gut microbe breakdown?

Jain thinks it should be. “We understand the human body at a biochemical level,” Jain told me. “Everything in your body is so personalized. That’s why we should change healthcare from the ‘one size fits all’ model.”

That’s why he created Viome, which uses an individual’s stool sample to check out what the microbes in their gut are doing. Based off of that data, the company can tell them which foods are good for them (and why)‚ which ones are not so good, and can also recommend dietary enzymes to help stabilize your gut or facilitate weight loss.

Viome used to be limited to analysis and supplements, but a few months ago the company acquired personalized nutrition company Habit. Jain said that they’re using Habit to add integrated recipes and meal planning into the Viome platform. Though it’s added new services, Viome has also gotten a lot more affordable. When it first launched in 2016 its test cost $400 — now it’s under half that.

All of this goes to show that personalized nutrition is getting more accessible, relevant, and better about pinpointing exactly how individuals should eat to meet their health goals. Is it the future of eating? It very well could be. The best way to find out is to join us at SKS as Jain and others do a deep dive into the potential power of personalized eating. We’ll see you there!

April 22, 2019

Viome Raised $25M for its Microbiome-based Dietary Guide Platform

Speaking with Viome CEO, Naveen Jain, it’s not hard to understand how investors, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Khosla Ventures among them, handed Viome a fresh round of $25 million in funding last week.

During our chat by phone, Jain was animated, proclaiming that it was a big week for him not because his company has now raised $45.5 million (and wants to raise $100 million in this Series B round) but because life is, in his words, “amazing!” and his company was working to make becoming sick a choice.

The company does this by collecting a stool sample from you (which you mail in) and running it through its software platform to analyze what microbes in your gut are doing to the food you eat. How your microbiome is treating your food can indicate what diseases you might be susceptible to, according to Jain. From there Viome applies AI to its findings to develop individualized dietary guidelines. Viome says there is no universal diet. Spinach, for example, might not be healthy for everyone because of the way your body processes it. By doing all this, Jain and company claim, Viome can help people avoid getting diseases like diabetes, or irritable bowel syndrome or even insomnia and depression.

The company’s claims and services aren’t without skeptics, even Jain himself has a controversial past. But that evidently didn’t keep investors at bay, and Jain says that Viome has a dozen clinical trials with various universities, labs and hospital networks to show the efficacy of his company’s service.

Viome has been on a bit of a roll this year. Back in February, the company acquired personalized nutrition service, Habit, from Campbell’s (terms were not disclosed). Habit’s original business was creating personalized recipes based on a person’s biomarkers. These types of personalized recipes, according to Jain, were a natural fit for Viome. In addition to recommending specific foods based on the biome, the company could recommend whole meals. Though Jain didn’t bring it up, it’s not hard to see Viome taking it one step further in selling personalized meal kits to people at some point.

But first, Jain said the biggest challenge for his company is generating awareness. He said the new money will go towards acquiring new customers, which will in turn provide more data that will make its service more useful. Additionally, Jain said Viome is working on a new type of test that only requires a finger prick of blood. This, by an unfortunate bit of timing, sounds a lot like Theranos.

Applying technology to your microbiome is definitely a trend. Other players in the space include uBiome, Day Two and Second Genome. Whether or not all of these solutions actually work and are something to get as excited as Jain about, remains to be seen.

April 5, 2019

Is Personalized Nutrition Losing its Shine as Industry Star Grimmer Rides Off on a Harley?

Breaking news: In one of the craziest pivots of all time, Harley-Davidson announced today it would diversify from its core business of making iconic motorcycles to launch a product line of personalized beef and pork jerky products based on an individual’s microbiome.

Just kidding.

But I have to admit, when I read the headline that Neil Grimmer, the food industry star who sold his first startup to Campbell’s and became perhaps the most well-known face in the personalized nutrition space with his second in Habit, was leaving the food business to become the President of Harley-Davidson brand, I did a double take.

I mean, a hog business would make sense, but The Hog business?

From yesterday’s press release:

Harley-Davidson announced today that Neil Grimmer will join the company’s leadership team as President, Harley-Davidson Brand.

As Harley’s first-ever brand president, Grimmer will evolve the brand to support the company’s strategy to build the next generation of Harley-Davidson riders globally. As the company expands into new segments and new geographies and seeks to inspire diverse, new riders around the globe, he will be responsible for all aspects of the Harley-Davidson brand including product planning, marketing, retail, apparel and communications.

While the news is a surprise given Grimmer’s high profile in food and, more specifically, personalized food, it’s not surprising given the context of recent developments with Habit and Campbell Soup, Habit’s main shareholder.

In February, Campbell’s divested itself of Habit when it sold the company to Viome, a startup that uses AI to analyze a person’s microbiome.  While Habit’s at-home test-kit doesn’t currently analyze the microbiome, it looks like that’s part of the plan as the company is integrated with Viome.  Here’s a quote from Grimmer about the transaction:

“With the advent of big data and computational biology, I believe it’s possible to provide everyone in this country and around the world a personalized blueprint to achieve their health and wellness goals,” says Habit’s Founder and CEO, Neil Grimmer. “Viome analyzes the gut microbiome at a molecular level with advanced technology from the Los Alamos National Lab, which is a great competitive advantage and great foundation for creating the ultimate whole-body nutrition solution.”

So, is this move by Grimmer (and Campbell’s) a sign the once white hot personalized food space has lost its shine?

Not really. If anything, Grimmer’s departure seem more to do with Campbell’s struggles and changes at Habit than anything. Over the past year, the old-school soup brand got more old-school as it started to sell off its more experimental businesses in a retrenchment back to its core soup and snacks business. At the same time, Habit pulled back from its original push into creating and delivering personalized meals based on a person’s specific nutritional profile to simply creating personalized meal plans.

And with Campbell’s selling off Habit, it’s not that surprising a fast-riser like Grimmer would want to try something new. The biggest surprise it he’s leaving food since he’s spent the majority of his career there, but the reality is Grimmer’s built a name as an out-of-the-box thinker and charismatic leader, traits that he could no doubt transfer to a new industry.

Unless, of course, Harley really is planning on that new microbiome friendly jerky.

You can see Grimmer’s talk about the future of personalized nutrition in the consumer kitchen from the Smart Kitchen Summit here. 

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